A blog by Luke Akehurst about politics, elections, and the Labour Party - With subtitles for the Hard of Left.
Just for the record: all the views expressed here are entirely personal and do not necessarily represent the positions of any organisations I am a member of.

Turnout was 33% (up 2% compared to 2006, but electorate has increased by 1300 as well)

For those readers unfamiliar with the idiosyncratic politics of Stamford Hill, this ward is very polarised between two southern polling districts which are mainly social housing and very ethnically mixed, Labour-voting and low-turnout, and two northern polling districts which are mainly owner-occupied with a large Chassidic Jewish population who (in this ward) vote Tory and do so on a very high turnout. Tory councillors at the count last night were describing the result as a referendum on the council's attempts to tighten up the rules on planning permission for residential extensions, a move which is unpopular with the Chassidic community.

Congratulations to Michael Levy the new Tory councillor and to Peter Golds and Matthew Coggins on their campaign. A silver lining to the cloud is that the Lib Dem vote collapsed despite their 5 separate leaflets each saying it was a two-horse race between them and the Tories - and an outrageous leaflet that was blue and stated on the outside that it was a message from the former Tory councillor!

A colleague has calculated that the Lib Dems delivered 19,500 leaflets during the campaign. An impressive 172 leaflets for every actual vote they got ...

Our Labour candidate Munaf Zina put in an excellent performance and worked extremely hard. I hope we will see Munaf as a Labour Councillor before too long – he has a great deal to bring to the council.

Other by-elections yesterday:

In my old stamping ground of Castle Point, there was a 17.5% swing from Tory to Labour in St Mary's Ward, Benfleet - the Tories clung on to one of the two seats being contested but my Agent from the 2005 General Election, Brian Wilson, gained a seat, putting a Labour voice back on a council where we lost our last seat in May.

Shepshed Town Council - 2 Labour gains from Conservative. I think this is in Loughborough parliamentary seat, which is a Labour held marginal.

I don't understand. My mum tells me that in the old days Hackney Council had 60 Labour Councillors and much more recently it had 59, with 1 Conservative. So does that mean that there were no Chassidic Jews here in those days, or just that they have multiplied very fast? They didn't use to vote Labour, surely?

The community is growing very fast - about 10% per annum aedult increase - due to both inward migration and a very high birth rate.

Before the 1990s "Tory Joe" Lobenstein was politically active in first the Liberals then the Tories but most of the community did not feel they should vote as they did not want to get involved in secular society.

In the 1990s the community first got politically active in Labour, but policy disputes over nursery education and planning issues, and allegations of malpractice in Labour candidate selections by Isaac Liebowitz (later, as a Tory cllr, convicted with LD cllr Zev Lieberman of proxy vote fraud) contributed to the split in the Hackney Labour Group in 1996. The Orthodox Jewish councillors who had been Labour all ended up as Tories or Lib Dems, as did other previously Labour figures such as Simche Steinberger, now a Tory cllr but then a Labour Branch Secretary.

A small minority of the community such as former Labour cllr Rabbi Pinter still vote Labour.

let's call a spade a spade here - it's clear the Tories did a marvellous job at getting their vote out - and squeezing the "third party vote", which was much more inclined to stay inside in the warm (as was the labour vote) than vote.

I was fascinated by your number of leaflets per voter stat for the liberals - i hear it was somewhat less than the number of harrassing phone calls per voter made by the Labour party to try and drive out the voters. Typical New Labour - let the voters freeze whilst you stay inside in the comfort of your committee room.

To be fair to our activists we had about 3 dozen people out in the cold knocking on doors (up to six times on the main estates), and only three people on the phones - plus me running the "Reading Pad" system - so most of us got just as cold as the voters but for up to 12 hours rather than the 15 minutes it takes to go and vote.

1. If you had 39 people knocking up, then that means you had roughly 15 votes per canvasser - and that's excluding the anything up to 3 councillors on each polling station. The Lib Dems on the other hand appeared to have a peak of about 4 people knocking doors on the day. QED.

I know you're not much of a leftist trainspotter, not being a leftist and all, but why on earth did the CP bother standing? From what I understand, it remains wedded to the idea the Labour party is the repository of working class political hopes, because of the union link, etc , etc. Can you shed any light on their rather peculiar electoral intervention?

Phil, it is force of habit. Monty Goldman of the CPB lives in Springfield and runs in every election in that ward and has for decades(plus for Mayor, one of the 2 Hackney parliamentary seats etc). His comrade Ivan Beavis sometimes stands next door in Leabridge. They are the last relics of the days when there were 2000 Communist Party members in Hackney and they controlled the Trade Council and had some cllrs.

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About Me

Labour Party activist since 1988 - firmly on the moderate wing of the party. Member of Labour’s NEC 2010-2012. National Secretary of Labour Students 1995-6. Parliamentary candidate for Aldershot (2001) and Castle Point (2005). Hackney Councillor (Chatham Ward) 2002-2014, Labour Group Chief Whip 2002-09, Chair of Health Scrutiny 2010-2014. Supporter of Europe, NATO/nuclear deterrence, Israel, electoral reform. Guardian reader. Dad. Oxford resident. Unite union member. Employment history as a Labour Party Organiser, Local Government Political Assistant, Director at a Public Affairs company. All views expressed in a personal capacity. The rest will become evident from reading the blog.